A woman I’ll call Anna was searching for a job in Texas when she stumbled across a generic listing for online work and applied. It was Remotasks, and after passing an introductory exam, she was brought into a Slack room of 1,500 people who were training a project code-named Dolphin, which she later discovered to be Google DeepMind’s chatbot, Sparrow, one of the many bots competing with ChatGPT. Her job is to talk with it all day. At about $14 an hour, plus bonuses for high productivity, “it definitely beats getting paid $10 an hour at the local Dollar General store,” she said.

They are labeling food so that smart refrigerators don’t get confused by new packaging, checking automated security cameras before sounding alarms, and identifying corn for baffled autonomous tractors.

These AI jobs are their bizarro twin: work that people want to automate, and often think is already automated, yet still requires a human stand-in. The jobs have a purpose; it’s just that workers often have no idea what it is.

“Some people don’t know how to stay in one place for long,” he explained with gracious understatement. Also, he acknowledged, “it is very boring.”

It’s difficult and repetitive work. A several-second blip of footage took eight hours to annotate, for which Joe was paid about $10.